Moritz von Oswald Trio – Horizontal Structures
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I really appreciate the work that journeymen like Moritz von Oswald are doing – fusing live electronics with a jazz player’s sense of structure, following the natural push and pull of improvisation. And I mean “work” because their efforts don’t always bear fruit, whether in terms of von Oswald’s long-form explorations or, say, the frenetic doodling of Kieran Hebden (Four Tet) and drummer Steve Reid. At times the pieces fall back to familiar territory, as with “Horizontal Structure 3″ on the Trio’s new album, which sounds a lot like von Oswald’s pioneering bass dub as Basic Channel (though not in a bad way).
But I’m most impressed with tracks like “Horizontal Structure 2″ (shared below) because they travel somewhere new. Listen to Sasu Ripatti’s long percussive coda and tell me you don’t hear echoes of his house productions as Luomo, as well as the shattered tides of his Vladislav Delay project. At times the piece threatens to hearken way, way back to the early ’90s Excursions in Ambience comps, but I’m chalking that up mostly to a similarity in structure and their return to somewhat organic instruments.
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